Chris Bell will tell you frankly that one term in Congress has hardened his politics.
“I am a more partisan Democrat that I was,” he says. “The place makes you more partisan.”
But he will also tell you that this deepened sense of partisanship is not what caused him to file an ethics complaint against his fellow Texan, Majority Leader Tom DeLay. And he laughs at the assertion that his charges will make the House a nastier, more uncomfortable place to work.
“There could not be a more caustic partisan atmosphere than what exists in the House of Representatives right now,” he says, “and much of it is caused by the individual who is the subject of this complaint.”
Bell may have started something he won't have to finish. When the lame-duck freshman filed his complaint against DeLay with the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct last week, he ended a seven-year détente between the two political parties on Capitol Hill that had involved an unspoken agreement not to file such complaints. But Bell, who lost in a primary last March, will not be here next year to endure the likely fallout.
An ethics investigation led to the ugly fall of Democratic Speaker Jim Wright in 1989. Six years later, the man who brought those charges against Wright, Newt Gingrich, assumed the Speaker's chair -- only to have an ethics probe lead to Gingrich himself being fined and reprimanded in 1997. After that, both sides seemed to acknowledge that ethics complaints were the political equivalent of nuclear strikes, carrying the threat of swift and sure destruction for both sides.
But nothing lasts forever, and the House has gone radioactive again. Anyone in the Congress with any power must be watching the recent developments with some unease. The Democratic leadership has vigorously distanced itself from Bell's complaint, going to great lengths to ensure that everyone knows that he is a lone cowboy. The visionaries worry that if, by some (increasingly plausible) miracle, they were to win control of the House this fall, vengeful Republicans will go after them. They would probably start with House leader Nancy Pelosi, who has been one of the great enforcers of the truce.
Privately, however, there is joy in Democratville -- mainly because DeLay is the man Democrats love to hate. One Democratic activist says he is skeptical that the charges will amount to anything: “God does not love me enough to let Tom DeLay go down over this,” he explains.
Whatever goes down, don't expect it to be pretty.
"You kill my dog, I'll kill your cat," promised California Republican John Doolittle, in response to the Bell filing.
Bell, who was once named the best radio reporter in Texas, says he has little use for the ethics moratorium. “It's offensive. How do you place a truce on ethics?” he says. “You shouldn't and you can't.”
The complaint accuses DeLay of influence peddling, of laundering political contributions, and of abusing his political office for partisan purposes. DeLay dismisses the complaint as the work of a sore loser, taking a potshot on his way out the door.
As it turns out, Bell's primary loss was largely the handiwork of DeLay, who masterminded a Texas redistricting plan that put Bell, who is white, in a largely minority district and made him an easy target for a minority challenger. And that's exactly what happened. In a race that took on troubling racial undertones, Bell lost to Al Green, an attorney who once headed the Houston chapter of the NAACP.
Bell says he's been working on the complaint against DeLay since last September, and that its timing has nothing to do with him losing his House seat.
The ethics committee agreed this week to review the complaint and must decide whether to launch a full investigation of the charges; they're expected to make a decision in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, a grand jury in Travis County, Texas, is investigating some of the same charges detailed in the Bell complaint. District Attorney Ronnie Earle has been probing whether Texans for a Republican Majority, a DeLay-controlled political action committee, used illegally raised money in the 2002 state legislative contests to help elect a larger Republican majority that gave them the votes necessary to redraw congressional districts. DeLay has dismissed that grand jury investigation as Democratic retribution for the redistricting.
Bell says he always knew about the possible repercussions of a decision to go after DeLay.
“Obviously we knew we were filing a complaint against one of the most powerful people in Washington, and we knew they were going to unleash their attack dogs on us, So far we're holding up pretty well.”
Asked whether he considered how this would affect his political future, he said: “Tom Delay is not well liked in the Democratic Party. He has no influence in the Democratic Party, not in Texas and not in Washington.”
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the online edition of The American Prospect.